Scene: You walk into a room "anywhere" with your laptop
in hand, wireless card in place. You join four work mates with their assorted
PDAs, laptops and cell phones. Shortly, three more associates saunter in with
their wireless computers.

Query: How to sync all the team’s portable devices for data exchange, and assure everyone’s on the same page?

Answer: Use a newly alphaAve.com-uploaded software toolkit devised by RIT professors Alan Kaminsky and Hans-Peter Bischof. The application uses wireless technology to automatically form networks among computers without needing a network administrator.

Managed by Xerox Corp. and Rochester Institute of Technology, alphaAve.com – the first web site for technology transfer where developers can trial promising software from both commercial and academic laboratories – announces its first RIT application.

RIT professors Alan Kaminsky and Hans-Peter Bischof designed the "middleware toolkit" to enable ad-hoc networking for a group with mobile wireless devices, notes Jeffrey Lasky, director of RIT’s Laboratory for Applied Computing (LAC).

"This application is another example of how alphaAve will help organizations find technologies they need without the heavy R&D costs," he adds. Using alphaAve software applications like this, added to Xerox’s numerous applications already posted on the site, is what alphaAve is all about, he says.

The RIT application is available, free, under the GNU Public License agreement, meaning that anyone can use the middleware, but must share any improvements they devise along the way.

Launched a few months ago among LAC’s earliest industry-partner projects, alphaAve is designed to speed new technologies to market by reaching early adopters and managing their feedback to maximize licensing and other business opportunities.

Notes to editors:

For information about test-driving the emerging technologies, visit www.alphaAve.com